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Rob Shearer@r.v.cx |
97 followers 41 following 4069 posts
Pretty sure I’m right about:
- RFC 3339 dates
- ISO 216 paper sizes
- Fahrenheit weather temperatures
- Dot-grid paper
- End-to-end encryption
- Software engineering being about collaboration costs
Less confident about the rest.
linktr.ee/rvcx
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Sometimes I’ll read a book—an actual book appearing on shelves in real bookstores—and find myself wondering whether the author has actually *read* a book. Any book. You think I joke, but “professor” Scott Galloway openly admits he’s written more books than he’s read.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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The real lesson here is in the deft framing. “Did it happen like we’ve been told” intentionally conflates a) “is anyone, from schoolteachers to random-guy-on-street, wrong, or simply ignorant, of any detail of the holocaust”, and b) “did the holocaust happen”. Followed by “yes or no”.
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Paul Krugman
@pkrugman.bsky.social
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Vive la France!
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I have to admit the first time I saw the finger-dying some countries do I thought it would be much better than our little “I voted” stickers. But the stickers are still nice.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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The (often pathological) American resentment of government bureaucracy is hard to understand for those from cultures with (often pathological) love of order-for-order’s-sake.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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This is also a reasonable analogy in that there is absolutely no danger whatsoever that it will be bank robberies that cause the financial system to collapse.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I think everyone in political media is at least subconsciously motivated by the knowledge that the only thing that can delay the collapse of their industry is utter catastrophe affecting the daily lives of all Americans.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Since we’re saying these things out loud, I’ve spent a lot of time this week very worried about SCOTUS assassinations. Lifetime appointments are an absolutely terrible idea for so many reasons.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I am extremely skeptical of any “SCOTUS will respect severe limits on the pardon power” theory.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Another route is that every time a president asks someone to do something, the request itself serves as an implicit pardon.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I think the only way Trump loses the election is if Democrats spread the sheer terror of Trump to the median voter. Which is as miserable a campaign as I can imagine. Absolutely dreading the next few months.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Don’t confuse that with some saccharine nonsense about changing these people with love and kindness. You can’t force people to change, and you sure as hell won’t force millions of strangers to change.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I’m not sure I buy this. The urge for fascism—the comfort of order—is not hard to access, and tribal hatreds are not scarce left of center. But “empathy” for fascists aligns with my experience that they are just incredibly insecure, fragile children. Pitiful creatures lashing out.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I mean, I don’t actually agree with this analysis of Rowling’s psychology, either. Her politics, including her transphobia, come from the left, not the right.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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“Influence” seems to be another euphemism you’ve substituted for my original “taken seriously”. Lamarck was influential. No modern biologist takes him seriously, because he was just flat-out wrong. (No: he was not talking about epigenetic exceptions.) All Freud’s specifics were similarly wrong.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Or dream analysis. Or female hysteria. Or literally everything he wrote about sexuality. The fact that he was sufficiently famous to kick off an actually-scientific study of the human mind does not mean *any* of his extremely specific theories were either true or useful.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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And of course your claim that all science is purely cumulative is just flat-out wrong. Newton made false predictions. And to suggest that Freud’s and Jung’s absurd musings were or are “true”, and merely elaborated with modern detail, is to betray a complete ignorance of the field.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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If you accept that arguable premise, you can’t possibly claim literature offers equal insight into the other sciences. And in fact I find it damning that literary scholarship reflecting on such expertise so extravagantly embraces completely discredited bullshit. /
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Ah it isn’t “part” of the human experience, it “speaks to” it. Iterate on your euphemisms enough and you’ll land on literature as an intentional explication, or at least case study, of human relationships, culture, and psychology. /
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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The drooling of a vegetative invalid is “part of the human experience”. It’s utterly disingenuous to pretend either scholars or writers aren’t making grander claims about their work. The writers, at least, can fall back on “people seem to enjoy it”.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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So you’re suggesting we should treat literature scholars’ insight into human nature, relationships, and psychology the same way we treat their expertise on surgical technique?
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I’ve hinted that my time consorting with humanities scholars in academia bred both contempt and respect for the maxim that no good comes of attacking other fields. So without judgement: a *lot* of the literature scholars I knew still took Freud seriously. And several were unaware anyone didn’t.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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The part of this I can’t get over is someone in 2024 citing Freud’s musings on sexuality as authoritative.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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It’s clear this will not be a fruitful exchange. Best of luck.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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It is utterly asinine to pretend the median voter knows much about either Harris or RFK. If you think swing voters have been tuned into the right-wing attacks on Harris your bubble has left you completely out of touch with reality.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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That’s clear.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Which is pretty much the same thing as the relentless PR assaults actual candidates are subjected to.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Not an exaggeration. “I will countenance absolutely no sanity-checking of any accusation against any tech company, no matter how absurd.”
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Among the many problems with modern journalism is the many writers who frame every issue as “the people vs big tech” (usually finding tiny VC scams to represent big tech), and openly declare that this ill-defined “tech” is always on the wrong side.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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As much as I dislike this court’s interpretation, I don’t think “government should operate to confirm the tripe teachers feed eight-year-olds” is a viable political theory.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I’d assume Harris’s numbers are inflated for the same reason RFK’s are. “Generic alternative” is a popular choice whose advantages evaporate if they’re ever taken seriously.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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We’ve been arguing over “the unitary executive” like suckers, and Roberts is just “the President is a branch of government”. So much for the mountain of law pretending it was anything more than that.
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Anil Dash
@anildash.com
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One thing I think people forget is how relentlessly *stupid* every day of the Trump administration was. He doesn’t need to do a big elaborate complicated conspiracy, he can just (e.g.) email a list of every U.S. agent in the field to Putin and say it’s to own the libs, and *that* will have immunity.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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A can’t-live-without feature of GoodReader is setting margins for crop-and-zoom. Research papers seem to be designed for a dozen nested “but shrink to fit A4/letter” iterations.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Does this definitively settle the “can you sell a pardon” question?
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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The most generous interpretation of SCOTUS is that they have no respect for precedent and plan to swoop in to save the republic in spite of the “autocracy is fine” rulings. Which is a misunderstanding of the power that will remain to them so egregious it would be comical in any other circumstance.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Confession: despite totally, 100% knowing they’re entirely different people with elements of both crazy and dishonesty that differ in both quantity and kind, in my mind I conflate Ray Kurzweil and Astro Teller into a single ur-futurist Googler. I’m not sure which one this should insult more.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Some students then learn “advanced data structures”, which is the same idea but with more exotic theory and content. Instead such a follow-up course should be “why, when, and how you’d extend those simple structures from the first course”. 2/2
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I’m incubating a new gripe about CS education: We teach “data structures and algorithms”, which is useful background, but we vaguely imply this is to teach engineers how to implement simple data structures. Which they absolutely shouldn’t do. That’s a longstanding complaint of mine. What’s new: 1/
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I’d be more of a mechanical bull billionaire.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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But I bet some were repeats.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Can’t let this go without quibbling with “unlucky”. It was *almost* very good luck that she made it all the way through a term she never should have started. It was an awful bet to begin with for practically no benefit to anyone but herself.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Amidst a sea of futurist garbage, Kurzweil *almost* hits a reasonable prediction before obfuscating it behind the term “intelligence”. The computational power available to us has increased by orders of magnitude in the past generation, revolutionizing science, and it will do so again.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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This kind of “validation” is more than enough excuse to ignore another futurist dipshit.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Someone tell me again how Apple holding back Apple Intelligence from the EU is purely out of a spite and not a rational reaction to explicit regulatory threats.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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I think this the Star Wars analog of the Star Trek trope that Klingons lose every fight unless they're up against other Klingons.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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A huge amount of both coursework and testing in formal education is simply getting students to regurgitate or rephrase or summarize information in hopes that this correlates with them actually digesting and processing it. That LLMs can game the tests even better than students doesn't say much.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Counterpoint: it’s possible that if you condition on “people who watched the debate live”, this correlation flips.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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Wondering if there’s been much analysis of how much less representative “black twitter” is of Black culture at large (and Black voters) than social media in general is of the overall public. My prior is that the smaller the selection the less representative.
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Rob Shearer
@r.v.cx
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It’s a brilliant PR strategy for the Acela, in its way. Imagine if you’d flown and the plane had stopped working at that point.
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